Horror - They're out There

God, I don't even know where to begin. So much has happened in the past couple days that it feels overwhelming to try and get it all down. I don't hold any more hope for my own existence, but I just have this compulsion to let someone know about what happened. I doubt that many of you will believe me, but I suppose that the best chance I have of winning over those few among you who are inclined to take this kind of thing seriously is to start from the beginning.

I work at a little restaurant in downtown Philly. Just off of Arch St if you know the area, though if you do I suggest adding as much time to your commute as it takes to avoid that it at all costs. I don't know if it would have helped if I had taken a different route to work that day, but if you truly believe anything I am about to tell you then you'll understand that no precaution is too great.

So anyway, I was riding my bike down Spring Garden yesterday morning, not far from 7^th st, and I guess I wasn't paying attention, because I ended up plowing into a woman and sending myself skidding across the sidewalk in the process.

So I'm a bit dazed and trying to figure out what just happened, when I notice the girl, who looks about seventeen from her position face down on the pavement, isn't moving. Now I'm still jacked up on all the adrenaline from the impact, and my brain is going a mile a minute with thoughts about how I might have killed her or something, so without even thinking I run over and see whats up. Her skin seems really pale, but I didn't see any scratches on it, and the floral skirt and tank top she had on looked totally undamaged, so I go and flip her onto her back. I don't know what I thought I was going to accomplish looking back on it, it was like somewhere in the back of my mind I thought I could perform CPR even though the only training I have is watching cheesy cop shows and medical dramas.

So I go and turn her over and right away a voice in the back of my head is just screaming “get the fuck outta there and don't look back.” but of course good old reasonable conscious mind is hitting me with the whole “fleeing an accident after causing a serious injury is consider a felony offense thing”, so even though this freakishly pallid girl is staring at me with shit eating grin on her face, I just sit there like a moron mumbling the usual “Are you okay?” bullshit.

Well, the only response this woman can give to my question is to just shoot up and grab hold of my face. All of a sudden I feel this weird sensation like cold liquid metal is oozing down my forehead. So naturally enough I spring up and just start booking it down the road, leaving my bike where it lay and not even caring how stupid I looked. Felony or not, some creepy shit like that happens, I don't care who you are, your flying the fuck outta there.

So I fly all the way to work, and by the time I get there I'm outta breath and sweating like it's prom night again. I feed my boss some bullshit story or another about what happened to my bike, clean myself off and just try to forget about everything that happened. But, like everyone else whose had a scare that doesn't end up leading to anything, I start over-analyze what happened. Poor girl was probably just sickly and delirious from the pain, and I just up and left her on the side of the road. By the end of the day I hated myself with a passion for abandoning both the girl and my bike, thinking about how much it was going to suck taking the bus until I saved up another couple hundred bucks.

So that whole trip home I'm pretty much lost in my own head, but I keep getting this sensation like someone is watching me. Just like before, good old Mr. Rational gets on the mind intercom and starts saying that its just the fact that you haven't ridden public transportation in a while and you're not used to being in such close proximity to all these people. But Mr. Rational can't quite get the voice that's saying something is wrong to shut up.

I end up making it home without any serious problems, and after some quality time with Netflix and my bass I manage to shove all that shit that happened outta my skull. I'm still pretty pissed at myself for ditching the bike and coming off like a selfish fuckstick in the process, but it's that second stage kinda pissed where your sorta calm at the same time, so I fall asleep without any problems.

I would say that I woke up in the middle of the night, but I don't know if waking up was the right word for it. I was certainly conscious, and yet I could not open my eyes and my body was locked in place. No matter how hard I struggled I remained totally still. Suddenly I felt that same half-solid half-liquid sensation going down my face. I could no nothing as it crept through my pores and burrowed deep within my flesh. I felt a hand slowly drifting from my head down to my legs, spreading the strange sensation wherever it went. Then, a moment later, it was done. I was aware that I could move again. That same screaming voice from before was now telling me to simply hold still and lay there silently until morning, but I had to prove to myself that it was all just some nightmare brought on by the strange circumstances of the previous day.

I opened my eyes just in time to see what looked like the girl that I had hit with my bicycle, wearing the same floral skirt and white tank top as before, heading through my bedroom doorway. As she was about to turn the corner and leave my line of sight she came to a sudden halt and then began to slowly spin around back in my direction. It was the same girl. I could tell somehow. But she was different now. Her skin was even more ashen then it had been before, yet somehow luminous. Like moonlight reflected off dusty marble. Her eyes were the same shape as before but were now sunken back within her skull. She jerked her head to the side and smiled a grin full of misaligned teeth.

“All done.” She said in a voice that wouldn't have sounded out of place in a high school cafeteria.

She slowly turned back around and began moving at an amble to wherever she was headed. I lay in my bed in total terror for the rest of the night, trying to convince myself that it was just a dream, but it wasn't easy. You see, I told you a bit of a lie earlier when I said I was feeling calm when I went to bed. I had been frightened, but it was that vague, unplaceable fright that you try to tell yourself isn't there. The kind of fright that leads a person to lock their bedroom door at night even though they can't quite say why. Yet my door was wide open.

Morning came with nothing further happening in the night, and with the rising sun came the return of Mr. Rational, who, unlike the rest of me, apparently had no trouble getting out of bed and running away sometime during the night. I could not deny that I had seen the girl, and that she had entered my bedroom, but what did it mean?

The simplest solution was that she had seen me on the bus and followed me home, which also helped to explain the sensation of being watched. She could have done serious damage or even killed me if she wanted to but she seemed content to simply scare me. She had probably slipped me some kind of drug that caused my body to freeze up, and then put on some creepy makeup and false teeth to frighten me. Once she got her payback for what I did to her she probably just went home. I still had a strange sensation within my body, like something deep down was shrinking into nothingness, but that was easily explained as a side effect of whatever she knocked me out with.

I thought about going to the hospital, but what could I tell them? If I gave them the truth I would be locked in a padded room for the next couple years. No, if she wanted to kill me she woulda backed my head in with a hammer while I slept and not risked giving me some poison that would allow me to see her and potentially warn people. With a workable explanation in my head, I decided that the best thing to do was to just go to work and let what happened sink into the past.

As I stepped out the door, I felt that same since of being watched that I had noticed on the bus. This time, however, the source was obvious. Across the street from the bust stop there was a couple that wasn't even trying to hide their gawking by at least putting their phones near their faces, they were just dead on staring at me. My first thought was that I had gone out with a stain on my shirt or something like that, but I spent the entire wait going over every inch of my body and I couldn't find anything weird.

I hopped on the bus and went to a window seat that looked out on the weirdos. I then watched as the couple, who I now realized were just as pale as the girl, moved their heads in perfect unison with my position in the departing bus. Her relatives? Was I being stalked? I tried to paint some kind of coherent mosaic that could sensibly incorporate all the strange occurrences that had happened: the woman, the strange sensations I felt, the staring strangers, but nothing I could come up with took all the variables into account.

Things just kept getting stranger as I crawled through work that day. Neither the feeling of being watched nor the vague sense of internal disturbance abated, and in fact both seemed to get stronger as the day progressed. I began to notice customers staring at me in that same “I don't give a fuck that you know I'm staring at you” kinda way, and they all had the same pale skin and deep set eyes. I began to notice that the same handful of people were passing by again and again, including the couple from the bus stop.

This was when I started to get truly scared, but what would you have done in my situation? I had no idea what these people wanted, so I really couldn't take any action. I mean what would the cops have done if I showed up rambling about ghostly people following me around? Same thing they woulda done at the hospital. At least at work I had a few coworkers around who might have intervened on my behalf if a physical altercation broke out, and that was better than being alone, so I rode out the rest of my shift as the strange people kept pacing around the establishment.

When work ended, I contemplated going to a bar or somewhere public, but I realized that would only be putting off the inevitable. It wasn't like getting a motel room would help either, since these people obviously had some means of keeping track of my movements. Plus, who would want to die in a motel room? The last thing I needed was for my family to think that I had been running a nice little side business getting serial killers from craigslist to plow me in the ass. My home wasn't safe, but neither was anywhere else. These people apparently knew how to pick locks, but at the very least there was no way they would catch me sleeping this time.

As I boarded the bus home, my heart almost gave out. Sitting among the packed crowd were two of the pale people who had been lingering around my job. Like earlier, they were flat out staring me down and doing nothing to hide it. I moved as far away from them as I could get and took the only available seat at that end of the bus, one of those shitty rows where you have to face the person in front of you.

As soon as I took my seat, the businessman in a pressed suit who was across from me lowered his newspaper and revealed a gaunt, grinning face full of teeth that hooked in every direction yet somehow locked together perfectly. I recognized him from earlier that day, when he, looking much less creepy, took a table at the restaurant. The fear that pumped through my veins was indescribable, and yet at the same time I felt like I had just crossed the threshold of creepy shit that I could silently endure, so despite my fear I just flat out asked him:

“Is this some kind of prank?”

“Prank. Prank.” He said, his voice at once matching the intonation of your everyday stock jockey and yet at the same time somehow contorted. “No. I do not believe that this meets the definition of a prank. Unless you were to say that, up until this point, the sense of safety and security you have felt in the world around you was an elaborate illusion which has now been suddenly revealed to you as the lie it always was, meets your definition of prank, in which case, surprise.”

The man stretched his lips far further than anything I had seen a human being do before as he said the final word.

“Who are you?” I stammered.

“Names, names, names. You humans and your constant desire to name everything. Such things are unnecessary among my own breed, but among your kind we have gone by many names. The Sumerians called is Lilu, among the Akkadians we were known as Rabisu, the Romans referred to us as Incubi, while in India we were named Vetalas. Further east, the Japanese called us, among other things, the Yuk-onna, while in Europe we have been given the moniker Vampyr.” he said.

“Are you saying that you are some kind of supernatural being, and that you and your friends have decided to come en masse to Philadelphia out of the blue? To what end? To terrorize the population?” I asked.

“No. We've always been here, or at least we've been here long before humans had made the voyage across the Bering, and we are not interested in pursuing the entire city. Only you.”

“This doesn't make any sense. Does nobody else care that a whole shitload of demon-things are wandering around the city? If you've been here as long as you say you have, how have I never seen you before?”

“Among the powers at our disposal is the ability to conceal ourselves amongst your kind so as to feed on individuals without drawing the full community's attention. When you encountered our outrider yesterday, she initiated a process that has moved you closer to us, so that while you see a human being with a handful of our true traits, the rest of the bus sees only a stoic businessman being accosted by one of the city's many lunatics.”

I looked around and noticed that, despite the bus being as crowded as it was earlier, the seats next to us were all empty.

“If you have the power to distort people's perceptions of you, and your goal is to hunt me down, then why not just kill me here and now? Why didn't that woman just devour me as I lay in bed last night? Is taking sick joy in tormenting your victims part of the hunt?”

“Your misery is merely a bi-product of certain necessities in our process. We are not the only ones with great power at our disposal. There are other beings, ones who have taken great pains to protect you from us. They communicate to your people in various guises and you tend to more or less ignore them, but they have done much for you and your kin. The gargoyles and Foo dogs that guard the gates of cathedrals and temples are ancient seals against us, while the skull channel meditations of Tibet are powerful warding practices. The activities of the Manichaean elect were largely focused on defeating us. These and many far older defenses have done much to keep your kind safe from us. It is now only possible for us to pursue one who has first made contact with us. When you collided with our outrider yesterday, you initiated a link between us that will soon break you away from all the ancient protections and will soon allows us to make contact with you.” he said.

“But the thing you call an outrider already touched me. Twice.”

The creature suddenly burst into a sickening laugh.

“We do not desire to eat of that pumping network of puss and gore that you call a body.” He said, leaning over and running his hand over my knee to prove his point. “No, we hunger for something far greater. What your people have called spirit, soul, essence, or animating principle. That strange sensation you have felt within is all of the mystical seals that keep it secure being devoured one by one. By sometime tonight the final seal will break and we will be upon you.”

“What will happen then?” I asked.

“Hmm. You humans have a gift for garbling things up, but your term damnation comes fairly close. In draining your being it will be transplanted to the realm we originally came from, where you will serve the needs and desire of beings similar to myself who were unable to find their way out.”

I got up and yanked the cord over and over. I didn't know what I was going to do but I knew I had to do something.

“Do you think I would have told you all that if there was any hope of your escape?” the creature asked. “Try to run and we will find you. We can smell the spirit of one who has been tainted in a manner similar to that with which a shark smells blood. Try to kill yourself and the links between us will ensure that your soul is shackled to your dead flesh until the process is complete. There is nothing you can do.”

So I sit here typing out this warning. I can see them all outside my window. Dozens of them. All just waiting. Even if I could describe the way they appear to me I wouldn't. I don't know what any of you can do with this information, but I just felt I needed to use my last moments on Earth to give a warning. They're out there, and they're looking for you.